Meet Sandboxer Tobias Jaeger. Born 1985 in Germany, Tobias founded his first company during his International Business studies at Maastricht University. He encourages everyone to consider becoming an entrepreneur to realize their own dreams. Find Tobias on Twitter and Facebook.

1. Tell us the story of your latest project / occupation.

In the beginning of the year I assumed the position of CEO at Entrepreneur Academy. I became the new partner and guy to internationalize our operation and take it to “the next generation”. We are the World’s Leading Personal Empowerment Authority, working with amazing entrepreneurs and other highly committed individuals around the world to enable them to reach their personal next level.

2. What are you doing and how did you get there?

I got to know the company as a client. My passion for the topic of personal empowerment led me and my partner to consider joining forces and taking the entrepreneur academy itself to the next level. I am in charge of taking the concept global and reach as many people as possible. We have set ourselves some big, hairy and audacious goals. You can imagine what I do like being the producer of a movie: I make sure everything runs smoothly.

3. Tell us about the biggest successes and failures in your life. What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?

My biggest successes are based on the fact that I continuously strive to expand the boundaries of my comfort zone. Becoming an entrepreneur has been one of the best decisions so far and I can honestly say that with my 20something years I am living my dream. I love and embrace every day.
The biggest failures would be some of my decisions that I took for my last online-startup. I think I made every mistake in the book: From misplaced trust in some key people and unrealistic expectations I guess I can tick all the mistake checkboxes.

5. What was your most inspring moment during the last two weeks?

We had a training session last week and I saw a client “puke” out all the anger that was in him for about 10 years. He literally broke out of his old self and discovered it to be OK to be who he really wanted to be. We work with exciting achievers in all kinds of fields. I am inspired by those moments in which people easily, freely, and happily change patterns and habits to do the things they really want to do.

6. How could other Sandboxers and the outside world support you and why would that be exciting for them.

Supporting us means to tell everyone about us and participate in our coaching and training. This world is full of great people and I love contributing to people going far beyond their own boundaries. Working with us or supporting us means to participate in those moments where people grow and use even more of their great potential.

Tobias’ favourite:

-book: (Oldschool) “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill (1937 Classic Edition) / (Newschool) “Rework” by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
-movie: “The King’s Speech”
-place on earth: Kauai, Hawai’i, United States
-travel destination during last year: Dubai, United Arab Emirates
-food: Anything truly authentic is appreciated
-drink: Espresso
-quote: “To be is to do” – Immanuel Kant

Meet Sandboxer Marin Licina, who loves creative things, art, people, and open minds. He studies Industrial Design, designs “things and business models” and he also teaches at Delft University. Born in former Yugoslavia but Dutch in both ideals and citizenship, Marin also has Italian roots for “good measure”!

1. Tell us the story of your latest project / occupation.

I’ve just finished designs on a hybrid wakeboarding boat, which was really cool. I wakeboard myself, and have always disliked the fact that you burn a lot of gas for some fun. The entrepreneur I’m working with is setting up a factory to produce these boats and it was incredibly inspiring to know that I get to design something for my own passion, that’s good for the environment and that’s going to actually exist. We’re testing the prototype in Romania in the spring! (And yes, I mean testing as in: me riding behind it on my wakeboard.)

2. What are you doing and how did you get there?

I somehow just gravitated towards Design & Engineering. It’s a great mix of all things design (cultural connotations of objects, aesthetics, coming up with innovative stuff) and technology (building prototypes, innovating through technology, learning production processes), plus some business (strategic product development, marketing). Entrepreneurship is a great way to criticize existing things. I have been busy building up businesses since I was 16. Then, in the last 3 years, I also got a number of teaching positions at my faculty, which is really fulfilling: it’s great to help others improve and gain new insights. I mostly teach form theory, sketching, design visualisation and the like.

3. Tell us about the biggest successes and failures in your life. What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?

Biggest failure: being overly perfectionistic on trivia during the first years of my studies. I tried to make everything 100%, while some stuff would never be read, looked at, used etc. I’m still a perfectionist, but I’ve learned effectiveness. I always say one should be like a laser: decide what to aim at, then give it pinpoint precision focus and do that really well. Saying no and deciding what’s not important is extremely significant.

Biggest success: Instead of accepting a run-of-the-mill Bachelor Thesis, I’ve pitched a project to Nespresso (they didn’t know our faculty existed before I called) and got their sponsorship to do it. The result were 2 incredibly cool concept machines that I’ve designed and built. Nespresso’s actively using some ideas I had invented and I was named Bachelor Graduate of The Year by my school. Wow, now that sounds way more formal than it really was.

4. What do you want to achieve in a) the next week, b) the next year, c) the next 10 years?

a) Pitch 3 concepts for an innovative [TOP SECRET DEVICE] to Philips managers.
b) Set up at least one new profitable business with my partners.
c) World Domination! (just kidding) – I want to have global impact. With meaningful innovation. But not work 25/8 on this. I think it’s imperative to have time for friends and family. And help (young) people in disadvantageous positions wherever I can.

5. What was your most inspiring moment during the last two weeks?

The Sandbox Amsterdam dinner! It was full of smart young people with a mission. Great to see people with open minds making an effort to improve the world.

6. How could other Sandboxers and the outside world support you and why would that be exciting for them.

I love the idea-exchange-pingpong. Synergy is a fantastic concept, and it’s great to see it happen when a couple of really smart people start thinking about something. What I love about Sandbox is people willing to give without getting something directly in return. So instead of telling what everyone could do for me, I’m openly inviting Sandboxers to tell me what I could do for them. I’m a practical person, so I can help out with lots of things, but my specialties are: visual thinking, sketching/drawing, technology, business model innovation.

7. Your Twitter/Facebook account

No Twitter. No Facebook. I prefer one-on-one communication and find online media often distract from my focus. (Perhaps I’m a bit like Paulie in Goodfellas).

Marin’s favourite:
- book: Thus Spoke Zarathrustra – Friedrich Nietzsche
- movie: The Usual Suspects
- place on Earth: Centre Pompidou, Paris
- travel destination during last year: New York, New York
- food: A draw: A really good, oozy mushroom risotto and a Chocolate soufflé
- drink: The Green Innocent Smoothie
- quote: “Everything should be made as simple as possible. But not simpler” – Albert Einstein

Meet Sandboxer Rob Ianelli, pronounced  ”eye-a-nelli”, and as he puts it, “there’s a lot of vowels”. He left high school at 17 to pursue his college education early, too eager to wait until he finished his senior year; he studied in Washington D.C. and Australia, and  went on to Babson College. Full of energy after Babson’s entrepreneurial approach of education, he endeavored in different ventures, and founded Hip Visions and WhatsUpNetworks. Find Rob on Facebook and Twitter.

1. Tell us the story of your latest project / occupation.

I’m working on WhatsUpNetworks.com – WhatsUpNetworks LLC which is the second company I started since college and I’m loving it. I always have had a blast throwing parties and had a love for marketing/branding and took all those interests and combined them with my favorite places: Martha’s Vineyard being one of them. It all started there building this online and offline community around content and experiences, and now we’re expanding to more “destination markets” to let them know “WhatsUp” and to give the community of 21-30 yr olds we target, one hell of a good time. Brands work with us to get involved and market their goods/services via our platform. It’s so much damn fun. I get to do what I love and wake up smiling.

2. What are you doing and how did you get there?

I’m living a lot of places and working with a lot of fantastic people and brands. I think I got here mostly on persistence and really focusing on a dream that I have had for a very very long time. Hard work never hurts, but ultimately, I think I am where I am today because of an incredible family, incredible friends and a thirst for life that will most likely never be quenched. I’m all about stacking the memories and never looking back. Carpe diem right?

3. Tell us about the biggest successes and failures in your life. What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?

My greatest success has been living up to my goals and having the friends that I have in my life. For me, it’s all about “bank a little money, but a lot of memories” and I’m very proud to say that my memories account is rapidly growing. I’ve had a lot of failures, not necessarily just one that is jaw dropping. I see failure as missed opportunities and that bums me out. One that comes to mind is I could have seen the Red Hot Chili Peppers Live in Ireland, and I passed on it for a stupid reason. Regrets suck and I’m not trying to do them anymore. So I suppose failure to me = regret.

4. What do you want to achieve in a) the next week, b) the next year, c) the next 10 years?

Next week: I want to cut a really juicy deal with potential client in Los Angeles and I’m also really hoping to get up to Napa Valley next week when I’m in California. I really love wine and that whole scene.

Next Year: I want to partner up with this one company I am in love with and I also want to get down to the British Virgin Islands for Yacht Week in March. Oh and I also can’t wait for SXSW in Austin!!!

Next 10 Years: I want to teach a college course and I want to start an organization that focuses on helping highschool students who are not academically excited, to think about entrepreneurship out of High School. I think a lot of kids fall through the cracks and don’t go to college, but could easily start their own business or pursue their dreams otherwise. I want to give back in this way, and it’s always been on my mind.

5. What was your most inspiring moment during the last two weeks?

I came across a binder of emails my Mom had saved for when I was emailing back and forth to home in 2006. I was living in Beijing China going to school and interning at Baidu. The thoughts, dreams and expectations I wrote that I wanted on my return to the US actually in some really wild way, came true, as I’m doing all those now in my life. It’s inspiring to think that dreams can be made into reality. It just takes a lot of hard work and vision.

6. How could other Sandboxers and the outside world support you and why would that be exciting for them.

Just say hi and really, that’s all I could ask for. I love meeting new people and learning their story and seeing if there’s anything in my past life and current that could be of help and/or we could work together. Collaboration is everything to me and that’s one of the biggest selling points about Sandbox. It would be exciting for anyone to collaborate with me because I really see the world big picture and anything is possible. I’m all about pushing the limits and seeing how far it can go. If we’re not testing limits and breaking down barriers, than what fun is that? Let’s make some moves.

Rob’s favorites:

- book: Let my people go surfing, Yvon Choinard

- movie: Training Day

- place on earth: Vietnam

- travel destination during last year:  just realized I didn’t leave the country – #fail – LOL

- food: kung pao chicken

- drink: amarone, red wine

- quote: The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” - Jack.Keroac

Every day, our community manager Katrin Winiarski, reads through her feed of all Sandboxers’ blog posts. Every Thursday, she chooses the most inspiring, funny or brilliant one and reposts it on this blog. This post has been written by Sandboxer Max Marmer. The original version can be found here.

Many things people strive for are actually byproducts of what the real goal should be. But by focusing on the byproduct instead of the goal, the desired byproduct is ever elusive.

Let’s look at a few examples:

Happiness

The real goal is finding activities you’re passionate about and consistently engaging in them.

That definition skews towards work, but consider spending time with people you enjoy being around an ‘activity’ and it can encompass romance and family time.

Becoming “Networked”

Lots of people want a big network, full of powerful influential people, but if you focus on that is the end goal it’s probably not going to work out very well and you’ll come off as very insincere.

Having a large, powerful network is the byproduct where the end goal is helping other people, building relationships or trying to make an important vision happen that others can get behind.

Making Money

Making money is a byproduct of focusing on creating value.

If you focus on making money, you might end up making a lot if you’re very driven, but if that drive was applied toward how you could create the most value, you’d make a lot more money.

The one caveat with making money is that it only captures the economic spectrum of “value”, but a lot of people are working on how we can measure other kinds of currencies and make them more fungible so that in addition to financial capital we can measure things like social capital and emotional capital.

Confidence

I can’t become more confident by saying to myself, “C’mon Max, be more confident”.

Confidence is a byproduct of being really good at something, which is only obtainable through practice and repetition.

Though often people can practice and practice and not improve. That’s why people will tell you, “practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” While that’s directionally correct, a better answer is “practice in pursuit of perfection will allow you to increasingly approach perfection and achieve excellence”

Conclusion

The list goes on and on of things that many people try to achieve directly but are actually byproducts: Enlightenment, Love, Creativity,  Status, Success, etc. etc.

It’s not wrong to want byproducts, but they are not things we can get, in the capacity we want, by focusing on achieving them directly. Byproducts are the rewards we get for living our lives the right way.

And by recognizing how byproducts break down into corresponding end goals it becomes clear there are no short cuts. When we care about other people, other people care about us. When we create value for others, we are rewarded financially. When we do amazing work, we gain respect. To live a rich life where we are happy, financially abundant, surrounded by amazing people and confident in our own abilities, requires cultivating curiosity, persistence, self-reflection, self-discipline, compassion, character, drive and many other esteemed traits.There is truth in the words that our external reality is a manifestation, or a byproduct, of our internal reality.

I encourage you to look at the things you want, and figure out what’s a byproduct and what’s the actual end goal that you should authentically commit to.

Max Marmer is a student at Stanford University, a young entrepreneur and Sandbox Ambassador in San Francisco, USA. He founded Force For the Future, a network that helps entrepreneurs with their first steps of the start-up life by mentoring, networking and more. Max is also resident of Palomar 5 and working for the Youth Noise Leadership Council.

What does Vincent, owner of New York pizza shop 11B Express, have in common with young entrepreneurs? Both go by the motto “If I don’t eat it, I don’t serve it.” This seemed to be the theme last night when NYC Sandbox Co-Ambassadors Niamh Hughes and Fabian Pfortmuller organized a 30+ guest Sandbox event with one of the leading European technology incubators, Seedcamp. Fired up by garlic jalapeno pizza (yeah, it’s a little potent) and several jugs of wine, NYC Sandboxers and Seedcamp entrepreneurs shared their pitches and passions.

Seedcamp has a group of seriously impressive companies on their US tour (going through NYC and San Francisco). Check out the startups below.  Guests included Reshma Sohoni (Founder of Seedcamp), Evan Cohen (General Manager of Foursquare), entrepreneurs from Columbia University, and many others. As usual, it was a delicious evening filled inspiring ideas.

Advertag – (London, UK) Tag-based search technology for classifieds and image search.

Brainient – (Bucharest, Romania) – Helping video publishers monetize video content by adding interactive elements and affiliate marketing.

Codility – (London, UK; Warsaw, Poland) – Automated testing of programmers via the Web, saving employers and recruiters both time and money.

Erply – (Tallinn, Estonia) – ERP on the web. Comprehensive CRM, accounting, billing and inventory management for SMEs.

Kukunu – (London UK) – A social travel planning platform to build and organize your holiday, because travel is better when you plan it yourself

Kwaga – (Paris, France) – Makes your inbox easier to manage by intelligently screening and organising your emails.

Patients Know Best – (Cambridge, UK) – Patient-controlled medical records. First customers include the UK’s largest private health care provider, and the UK’s largest children’s hospital.

Platago – (Vienna, Austria) – Helping game developers to publish their games on social networks.

Shoutem – (Zagreb, Croatia) – Enables you to create your own microblogging community for your business or brand.

Wondergraphs – (Leuven, Belgium) Social business analysis that saves organizations time and money with easy to use exploration, sharing and context aware search

YubiTech – (Ramat Gan, Israel) Enabling mobilization of Desktop application to cross-mobile platform, in a fraction of cost and time, bringing best user experience to the mobile users.

At Sandbox we’re fortunate to interact every day with some of the most inspiring young innovators around the world. Our members are constantly driving new ideas and exploring untouched opportunities. Observing patterns within our community and studying trends of our clients, we identified six major themes to watch out for in 2010 and beyond:

1. Unique and Genuine Corporate Cultures

Many young people today are afraid of becoming “corporate slaves” limited to standardized work without any meaning. To be successful, companies increasingly don’t only have to be efficient, but must also create genuine corporate cultures that attract and retain employees, customers and shareholders.
Read more >>

2. Create Meaningful Relationships

Being connected to others is crucial to our personal and collective success. The evolving “social web” phenomenon has made these interactions easier. In turn, creating and sustaining meaningful relationships will become even more important and valuable.
Read more >>

3. Hippies 2.0: Do What You Love and Get Paid for It

More than ever, young people have a strong desire to do something meaningful in their lives. We see twenty-five year olds having their “quarter-life crisis” and asking themselves about their purpose in life and how it impacts society. This new “passion generation”, as we call it, mixes their drive for meaningful impact with another old concept: capitalism.
Read more >>

4. Linking Data to Objects

The term “augmented reality” has been around for some time. It describes technologies and processes that add digital data to real-world objects and places. Now, finally, we think that all the pieces are in place for these technologies to spread widely, become more developed, and dramatically alter our lives.
Read more >>

5. Social Business Design

The internet is more than a tool, it is an evolving user-powered organism that creates and manages vast information. The trends seen in the evolution of the internet can be leveraged by organizations and translated into new structures, processes, business models and cultures. “Social Business Design” makes organizations more agile, more connected and more transparent.
Read more >>

6. Emplotment: The Skill of Making Sense of Stuff

Historically, the most natural form of communication is story telling. Then came the ideals of rationality and objectiveness and banned stories to the realms of fiction. Today, we experience information overload. As the vastness of data around us increases, the value of storytelling multiplies.
Read more >>

In many ways, the six themes overlap and share the following properties:

• Emotional Innovation: In pursuit of happiness, we are creating innovative living and working spaces that give sense of purpose and reflect our passions. We also had intense discussions about this topic at the recent Palomar5 summit in Berlin.
• Blending Virtual and Physical: Technology is no longer just an instrument, it is deeply integrated into the heart of society, amplifying the individual voice and shifting social dynamics.
• Social Everything: The internet was the start, but today everything is connected through the social web, from organizational structures, corporate cultures, product development, marketing, problem solving, and the human experience.

We would love to hear from you: What do you think of these topics? What are your big trends for this year? Let us know in the comments!

This blog post is part 2 of the Sandbox Network ‘Palomar 5′ series: a six week innovation camp in Berlin from 9 October – 24 November 2009. To follow the progress of the conference, you can view the official Palomar 5 blog. Alternatively, if you are on twitter, follow hashtag #p5 for real-time updates. You can also check out one of our camp member’s daily video blog on Youtube. (Part 1 is here)

By Max Marmer

Two Thirds of the Palomar5 Innovation Camp has already passed. Four weeks down, two to go until the 2 day Summit, when we will have the opportunity to present the fruits of our labour to an eminent group of thought leaders, politicians, scientists and investors.

Before we dive deep into the Palomar5 experience let me give you a quick overview of the last month:

Our first two weeks, focused on understanding the thought landscape we’re operating in, generating hundreds of ideas for projects mixed in with some intense bonding experiences. Two weeks of intensive prototyping ensued, and now we’re transitioning into storytelling mode for the summit.

The last 4 weeks have been amazing but I was hoping to get more done. But that’s probably just my restlessness to change the world talking. But it is strange how fast a month has flown by.

We had our second “reality check” yesterday, where we all presented what we’ve been working on to many highly respected professionals and received their feedback. Someone asked me how long ago the first reality check was, it felt like ages, a month at least, but in reality it was only two and half weeks.

As a rule of thumb, if you’re trying to describe a prolonged experience and it feels like time has passed incredibly quickly but when you reflect on things you did in the beginning and it feels like it happened a long time ago, it probably means you are doing something right.

The Final Stretch

I have spent a lot of time the last few years learning about frameworks that have supported me in developing visions for a better future, but it has taken time for my entrepreneurial skills to catch up to the size of what I’ve set out to accomplish. The last half a year I’ve become increasingly anxious about pontificating while building takes a back seat. With only two weeks left of the camp part of me wishes more had been accomplished while here. But I have to realize that while we’ve been here a month, real work only started two weeks ago and our last two weeks of focus have been incredibly productive. The end goal of the Palomar5 camp is not to create fully functional products for the summit. Of greater importance to Palomar5 is conveying the underlying vision behind our projects and validation of the experiment of bringing 30 diversely talented young people from around the world and forcing them to live and work together for 6 weeks. Fully functional projects that make an impact are definitely vital for the success of Palomar5, but we don’t want to be another idea factory producing theories and patents; we want our projects to make a mark on the world, but the purpose of the 6 week camp is just to create the gravitational core for these projects to continue to flourish once the camp is over.

The summit should play a huge role in jumpstarting this process, but it all depends on the quality of our storytelling and how well we convey the enveloping experience of Palomar5: the lifestyle, the passion, the big projects and all the little creative projects the flit in and out serving as creative fuel for our bigger initiatives. If we do this well, TED-esque as we all like to say, (it being our common inspiration and the height of sexy intellectualism), we’ll create a buzz around the camp that will accelerate the development of our projects.

The Malzfabrik and Beyond

While we’ve spent most of our days in our stylish cubes dreaming up the next big thing followed by nightly recharges in our sleeping boxes, the weeks have not been without some atypical extracurricular activity.

After an intense first three weeks the Palomar5 team announced a mysterious weekend trip with few details except that we were supposed to bring our passport and pack warm. We speculated about trips to Poland or Holland.

On Halloween morning we piled on our bus unsure of our intended destination. A few hours later we found ourselves at the beginning of 8 kilometer canoeing expedition down a river somewhere in northeast Germany. We exited our canoes 3 hours later to find ourselves on the outskirts of a sparsely populated town with a nearby castle awaiting our presence. In the evening our creativity was out in full bloom as we showed off our elaborate characters including killer Mario, the bloody nurse and cross-dressing men.

Our favorite part of the weekend getaway at the castle was the sauna buried in the basement with plenty of half naked sandboxers to go around. We now request saunas wherever we go.

Other highlights included a Sunday afternoon project constructing an 8 meter mask out of branches and twigs, which was burned in it the evening. And I enjoyed my longest period of silence in a while during a solitary forest walk.

Atmosphere

Earlier this week we attended the ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. On our walk back we noticed how this experience felt like the beginning of a new school. We’ve been living together for a month now and it feels like this is just the beginning of a new phase of our lives, which it is, but at the same time our concentrated camp experience is heading into the final stretch. The flight home will be very strange. The following weeks we’ll experience withdrawals as we return to reality, basically from the future. While we’ve been working on inventing the future of work, we’ve also been living it. This experience has seamlessly combined, friendship, fun, adventure and the birth of some really ambitious projects.

One thing I might change if I knew this could last beyond 6 weeks is not working as many hours during the day, I feel like life is cyclical, times where intense focus is required and other times where experimentalism is a better frame of mind. Making the most of my time here has been a higher priority for me. Trying to change the world takes sacrifice; again my restlessness talking.

How we maintain the community after the camp is an issue that looms large in all our heads, both for the continued success of our projects and the friendships we’ve built.

No matter what happens I think we can all say that the camp has inextricably altered our lives. And we’ll look back on our lives in a few years time categorizing our experiences with two denominations: BP and AP. Before Palomar5 and After Palomar5.

The pace of learning at this camp has been so high. I’ve often thought about what kind of person I’d become if every night I could go to bed completely mentally exhausted from the pushing my 3 pounds of grey matter continually past its limits. Palomar5 has given me four weeks of that dream. Everyday we discuss wide-ranging ideas, on many topics like learning, innovation, and culture.

One night Valentin and I were up late debating whether culture or technology was the stronger force driving society forward. While interesting, these conversations rarely lead to anything tangible, but Palomar5 begs to differ. The following day we were discussing how the iPhone achieved widespread cultural adoption so fast with technology so far ahead of what was previously available (normally a sticking point for products ahead of their time) and how our projects could succeed by similarly speeding up cultural adoption. The conversation immediately jumped to a new level as we drew on last night’s debate. Something in both our minds then clicked, “Wow that’s a first! Last night’s debate was enjoyable, but I never thought it would actually be productive.”

What We’ve Been Building At Palomar5

The theme of the camp of was the future of work, but that was just a starting point to sell the project. We’ve been given very little structure, and that’s the way like it. Lack of direction does not mean chaos, at least over the long term, our projects have naturally converged around big themes: Social consciousness, data and entrepreneurship.

These are incredibly important areas where a lot of growth will be made, and it’s even more notable that we were not told to pick 3 these topics, but our internal compasses driven by creative destruction, cycling through hundreds of projects over the last 4 weeks, led us here.

Our vision for redesigning society for digital age and generation is now more palpable with these themes guiding us. What’s notable is that while many of dreamed of redesigning society this kind of re-envisioning around our idyllic yearnings hasn’t always been possible. The industrial era required sacrificing creativity in the name of scalable efficiency, which was necessary to create the infrastructure to raise the quality of life to what is today. But while this era is long past its expiration date, it continues to live on like an infectious bacteria, contaminating our work and lives. So many of us realize it’s time to reinvent society and its organizations from the ground up, we now just need to commit to making it happen. Count Palomar5 in.

Magnifying Glass — Palomar5 Project Sneak Peak

Here’s a sneak peak into the vision of the project I’ve been most intensely involved in:

We’re postulating the future of work is going to have a lot more startups, because that’s where all the innovation is coming from.

The startup accelerator model is a big part of the future innovation landscape, think YCombinator, Techstars, Seedcamp, and now there are accelerators for more than web startups, using basically the same model like Palomar5 and the Unreasonable Institute. We think we’ll see a lot more of these.

The rise of accelerators means that there are now two big emerging markets: Pre and post accelerators.

We’re trying to build many of the tools needed to support startups post-accelerator: expert feedback systems, social network amplification in order to get connected to the right people, just in time learning to acquire skills to overcome new challenges, and repositories of best practices and eventually developing some kind of recommendation engine to streamline and automate the whole ecosystem.

Also, while startups are more innovative because they have freedom, flexibility and autonomy corporations still possess advantages of scale and greater resources.

Startups need to achieve advantages of scale as well, but they will be able to do this modularly and collaboratively. Currently large organizations are organized like big towers, even Google operates like this. But startups will be able to achieve scale and preserve their autonomy by acting like lego pieces. Currently, startups don’t have lego functionality, they’re just rectangular blocks that don’t interface well with each other but we’re providing the knobs and the holes to assemble large towers for particular projects that can easily dissemble at the conclusion of the project and build a new tower.

The prototype for our skill acquisition platform for entrepreneurs has recently been launched. Currently we’re only offering it to alumni of startup accelerators. http://forceforthefuture.com/founders-first/

Conclusion

There’s a lot of uncertainty in many of our lives now, but I love it. Many of us have nothing to go back to, no work to return to, just the opportunity to take the projects and relationships built over the 6 weeks as springboard for the next few years of our lives. It’s easy to get scared by the uncertainty, I still fall victim to it from time to time, but I know it’s really just a sign I’m taking good risks. While it’s comforting to know what life has in store, the predictability is antithetical to impact and growth.

A few nights ago Eddie (Harran) was hopping around in the cube with typical exuberance saying, “I wish could just work with you guys for the rest of my life” “What’s stopping you?” “Well, nothing!”

More about the Young Entrepreneurs of Sweden; YEOS is a nationwide network established to connect, educate and inspire young entrepreneurs in the age from 18 to 30. YEOS was founded to be an accelerator helping young achievers learn and grow with the help of each other, which shall lead to more successful businesses and an enriched private life. The network relies on is members for the development, having a cooperative legal setup where each member is a part owner. Each year, YEOS arrange two national events and several regional meetings gathering the foremost young entrepreneurs in Sweden to exchange ideas, network and be inspired. Activities of the network are mainly financed by partners and project assignments.